Fantasy Network Review – Parasocial Platforming | GameObserver Cautiously Recommends

Fantasy Network in an odd duck in many ways. It’s main character, Lyn, wouldn’t feel out of place as the mascot of a 16 or 32-bit console in that she’s a teenage, blue-haired anthropomorphic Lynx who wears roller blades and fingerless gloves literally everywhere she goes, and also fights with an umbrella. Fantasy Network is also the first metroidvania to incorporate social media as a progression mechanic, along with racing, cooking, dancing, gaming, and fashion mini games. Again, as part of progression.

The game begins with Lyn having a strange dream of people facing an army in space that’s far more plot relevant than it might first seem, only to wake up and find that her mother has been kidnapped. The kidnapper’s demanded ransom? Become president of the planet. While this is an absurd request, it is fortuitously timed as the current planetary president is stepping down, and his successor will be determined by whoever can prove themselves a true citizen of the planet and its people by winning a number of competitions across the world. That would be the various mini games I spoke of previously.

But it’s not so easy. First off, Lyn has to enter each of these competitions, and the qualifiers for them are located across the planet, meaning she will have to travel across the world to enter each competition. Of course, to enter each competition she needs to learn where they are, and the best way to do that is through social media, after picking up a few followers and topics of discussion. The way to do that is to go out into the world and interact with random people and objects to get an idea of what to talk about. With that knowledge Lyn can adventure across the map to earn coin, find upgrades, travel to new towns, and compete in the contests to save her mother. Lyn’s growing legion of fans can also provide material support in the form of items like healing items and chest keys randomly delivered to her home.

Fantasy Network is vibrant and colorful, with 1990s cartoon or gaming mascot vibes all over. Everything is distinct with solid lines, and the world is built with a fabulous blend of 2D sprites and 3D models that don’t quite match, but still look good together. There’s a pretty good variety of enemies, both in terms of generic types and distinct subtypes that you can immediately tell apart by color. Boss enemies are also big and colorful. They could probably use a little more telegraphing of moves, but their patterns aren’t too hard to learn.

To start with, I couldn’t get Fantasy Network to run properly on my multi-monitor desktop, but it worked just fine on a much older single monitor setup and Steam Deck, so I have no earthly idea why it wouldn’t work on my high end multi-monitor machine. The next thing to note is that the game does not have a resolution selection just yet; you are limited to either full screen or windowed mode – both cases are in 1080p to the best of my ability to estimate – and the game will adjust your screen resolution to fit in when you play in full screen. There’s also only one control scheme and no way to remap buttons yet.

To begin with, Lyn can run, jump, swing her umbrella, block attacks with it, dodge, throw projectiles, and check social media. There are obvious movement upgrades like double jump, air dash, and the ability to move and breath underwater – though nothing stands out too much. Lyn’s roller blades aren’t just for show, by they way. She moves with momentum and getting newer, better skates will let her build speed faster and achieve higher top speeds, or roller blade in strange new ways.

Skates are one of several inventory items that Lyn will have to find and buy over the course of the game. Others include offense-boosting umbrella tops, defense-boosting sports tops, and other equipment to boost Lyn’s stats or grant her effects like water breathing. Much of this is bought in stores, but some must be found out in the wild in chests, some of which must be unlocked with keys, or in locked drawers and lockers which need lock picks to open.

Lyn starts the game with three hearts of health, but that’s a lot more than it might initially seem as, even to begin with, it can take several hits for enemies to reduce her health even by just one heart. Fantasy Network is generally very forgiving in terms of health and damage, which is good because the game maps the same button to block and dodge. You block if you are not moving and dodge if you are, which is a problem because the control scheme can’t be changed. Multiple times while playing, I have made Lyn dodge into a stage hazard when I meant to block an enemy attack. I do not think I was holding a direction during these moments. I think the game might have an issue with frame delays, as there were a couple other minor instances of sluggish reactions, but honestly being able to move these two functions to different buttons would be excellent.

When you die, you reload back at the last checkpoint you passed, which is usually the start of a room, but some larger rooms will have visible markers that turn green as you run past. You reload with all the items you picked up, even if you picked them up after your last checkpoint. Some rooms can get very vertical, which is fun, but also frustrating because the game loves to bombard you with aerial enemies that will attack while you’re mid jump over a wide gap and send you careening down several levels. You get four lives to make it through an area, with the lives resetting when you rest at an inn. Even if you do lose your last life, the game just sends you back to Lyn’s house without further penalty and asks if you want to save your game before continuing.

There are multiple types of minigames, and you have to complete multiple rounds of each. The final level of each requires going out and adventuring to find a special item or secret to give you an extra edge, and all of these must be found out and about in the world. Social media will give you hints to these locations, but it’s not required to find them. The cooking contest was quite confusing, mostly for its strange interface. The racing game was very solid, though. The dancing mini game was just a standard rhythm game (though, again, I felt like inputs were sometimes on a slight delay here), but all of them had charm. Another minigame I tried wound up with the opponent rendering it unable to attack or be hit, rendering the minigame un-endable. The developers are working on fixes for much of this, but they do bear mentioning in the game’s current state.

I like what Raven Travel Studios are trying to do with Fantasy Network. It’s a charming game, it just has a lot of rough edges that need sanding, from ironing out typos in NPC dialog to adding resolution and control scheme settings. If you can get past those then it’s a fairly funny adventure platformer.

Tim reviewed Fantasy Network on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game that was available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.